BT 378 

P8 V4 

Copy 1 



THE 
LOVING FATHER 




THE LOVING FATHER 









COPYRIGHT, 1913 
BY LUTHER H. CARY 




THE. PLIMPTON. PRESS 
NORWOOD* MASS* U-S«A 



f*r 



QCI.A357163 

1U) / 



kYf]55 


S^^^^J 


mmmmm 




1 




m 




j$3 


TO 

THE SANCTIFYING MEMORY OF 

WILLIAM THAYER SMITH 


B&> 




ffi* 


SOMETIME DEAN OF THE MEDICAL SCHOOL OF 
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 


^\V 




Iss 




w> 




1 




^1 




w 








Em 




fir' 




u^ 









SeC^O* ffftt i£s2S ?2«; •wSfc «0«CS5s' 



THE LOVING FATHER 



VEHSSm 





THE LOVING FATHER 

And he said, A cer- 
tain man had two sons : 

And the younger of 
them said to his father, 
Father, give me the 
portion of goods that 
falleth to me. And he 
divided unto them his 
living. 

And not many days 
after the younger son 
gathered all together, 
and took his journey 
into a far country, and 
there wasted his sub- 
stance with riotous liv- 
ing. 

[9 ] 



%i£^&&$$&^ts fe&^$^^%£5ES*^ 




The Loving Father 

And when he had 
spent all, there arose a 
mighty famine in that 
land; and he began to 
be in want. 

And he went and 
joined himself to a cit- 
izen of that country; 
and he sent him into 
his fields to feed swine. 

And he would fain 
have filled his belly 
with the husks that the 
swine did eat: and no 
man gave unto him. 

And when he came 
to himself, he said, 
How many hired ser- 
vants of my fathers 
have bread enough and 

[IO] 









The Loving Father 

to spare, and I perish 
with hunger ! 

I will arise and go 
to my father, and will 
say unto him, Father, 
I have sinned against 
heaven, and before 
thee, 

And am no more 
worthy to be called thy 
son - make me as one 
of thy hired servants. 

And he arose, and 
came to his father. 
But when he was yet 
a great way off, his 
father saw him, and 
had compassion, and 
ran, and fell on his 
neck, and kissed him. 
["] 




The Loving Father 

And the son said 
unto him, Father, I 
have sinned against 
heaven, and in thy 
sight, and am no more 
worthy to be called thy 
son. 

But the father said 
to his servants, Bring 
forth the best robe, and 
put it on him ; and put 
a ring on his hand, and 
shoes on his feet : 

And bring hither the 
fatted calf, and kill it; 
and let us eat, and be 
merry : 

For this my son was 
dead, and is alive again; 
he was lost, and is 

[12] 




The Loving Father 

found. And they be- 
gan to be merry. 

Now his elder son 
was in the field: and 
as he came and drew 
nigh to the house, he 
heard music and dan- 
cing. 

And he called one of 
the servants, and asked 
what these things 
meant. 

And he said unto 
him, Thy brother is 
come; and thy father 
hath killed the fatted 
calf, because he hath 
received him safe and 
sound. 

And he was angry, 
[13] 




The Loving Father 




and would not go in: 
therefore came his 
father out, and 
treated him. 

And he answering 
said to his father, Lo, 
these many years do I 
serve thee, neither 
transgressed I at any 
time thy command- 
ment: and yet thou 
never gavest me a kid, 
that I might make 
merry with my friends : 

But as soon as this 
thy son was come, 
which hath devoured 
thy living with harlots, 
thou hast killed for him 
the fatted calf. 



The Loving Father 

And he said unto 
him, Son, thou art ever 
with me, and all that I 
have is thine. 

It was meet that we 
should make merry, 
and be glad: for this 
thy brother was dead, 
and is alive again; and 
was lost, and is found. 
Luke 15: 11-32 




THE LOVING FATHER 



THERE is nothing that we 
so much desire as the rend- 
ing of the veil that lies between us 
and ourselves and the veil that lies 
between us and our God. There 
is nothing save the record of Pas- 
sion week that this earth possesses 
that has so much power to rend 
them as this story of the prodigal. 
Through this fifteenth chapter of 
Luke millions of the human race 
have entered the holy of holies 
and have knelt in it, thankful and 
unreproved. They have come out 
of sin and despair, out of bitter- 
ness and hardness and doubt to 
this simple court of the nations, 
and after they have crossed it 
they have gone on into the audi- 
ence-room of God as simply as 
though it were the sitting-room 

[17] 




zs 




1 



The Loving Father 
at home. For it has made them 
conscious of a self they had never 
realized, a self that is at home 
with God. 

What a simple thing this story 
is. When God prepared this 
royal way to lead men to Him- 
self, He built it not out of 
rainbows and sunset-clouds and 
musical tones and semi-tones, but 
out of human words. And from 
these He chose the very simplest. 
There is no fine-spun preciseness 
of phrase either of legalist or of 
philosopher, there is no lofty 
flight of eloquence, no subtle 
literary delicacies, no royal forms 
of address. These are all laid 
aside, compassionately but firmly 
folded up and put out of sight. 
When God constructed this main 
avenue to Himself He did not 
unlock a study or set a man a 
problem or give him a fort to 
storm; he simply placed him 
before the window of home and 
[18] 



I 



The Loving Father 
expected him to look in. It is 
not even a perfect home. The 
mother is lacking; the boys are 
both what we do not wish our 
sons to be and what we ourselves 
have many of us been. They 
both live selfishly ; they both fol- 
low their desires; the desires of 
one are sensual, the desires of 
the other avaricious. And yet 
it is a home because these boys 
are not alone in the world. Lone- 
liness is possible in crowds; it is 
possible among one's relatives 
even; it is annihilated not by 
numbers but by love. Neither 
of these boys was lonely, though 
one of them went very far away, 
for they were loved. No one 
of us is really lonely unless there 
be no one in all the world who 
loves us. These two boys had a 
father who loved them and that 
love, going out naturally and in- 
evitably to the boy who was 
weak and far away and to the 

[^9] 




The Loving Father 
boy who was hard though daily 
touched by love, makes these 
lives solemn and sacred for us. 
And it is this love — this com- 
monest of all things on earth — 
this love, which does not even 
have a holy object to exalt it and 
to make it transplendent, it is 
this love that shows us what man 
and God is. 

But it needed Jesus to show 
us its greatness and to teach us 
to revere it. No one had ever 
denied that a father had loved a 
worthless son, but no one, unless 
it was Hosea, had ever dared to 
say that it was right; indeed it 
was generally suspected that pure 
forgiveness was a sign of indul- 
gent weakness; some of us even 
suspect it still. Jesus does not ar- 
gue; he simply paints and leaves 
it to us whether to hang the pic- 
ture on the line in the gallery or 
put it in a corner out of sight. 
That he knew he was not utter- 

[20] 






The Loving Father 
ing a commonplace in depicting 
the beauty of this love is very 
plain; then there would not have 
been two sons; the prodigal 
would have been enough. As a 
matter of fact the world had two 
methods of treating a sinner ; the 
way of the elder brother and the 
way of the father in this tale of 
the home, and it was quite an 
open question as to which was 
right. Or perhaps it was hardly 
open; the Pharisees had almost 
closed it; the world was all but 
on the point of applauding the 
elder brother. There was a good 
deal to be said on that side; it 
was hardly just to kill the best 
calf for the worst boy; he cer- 
tainly had not deserved a calf and 
a feast and the best robe and gold 
rings; it seemed to be reward- 
ing debauchery. There is just as 
much to be said on that side now, 
only everybody is ashamed to say 
it; no one wants to be seen de- 

[21] 



smJ^O* frSag* »§£§ %3s&* •*£?&$ nl* 5 



The Loving Father 
fending justice; what is it that 
has thus amazingly stopped men's 
mouths and has settled the mat- 
ter? This story and Calvary. 
For see how wonderful this story 
is and how completely final. 
Jesus does two things. First, he 
paints the two attitudes to a re- 
pentant or at least to a disgusted 
sinner so that they may be looked 
at together — the one, saying to 
the outcast, We will welcome 
you when you make restitution 
but not before; the other, asking 
him no questions and showering 
honors upon him. He paints the 
two detached from each other 
yet close together, and then, in 
the second place, with absolute 
truth to nature, he represents the 
one attitude by a brother and the 
other attitude by a father. 

And humanity took that pic- 
ture when the painter was dead, 
and hung it not on the line but 
in a separate room, in which 

[22] 



The Loving Father 
from that day to this every suc- 
ceeding painter of the soul has 
tarried many an hour. That was 
the end of the religion of the 
law. 

Since then, we call the treat- 
ment of the elder brother insist- 
ing on exact justice unnatural, 
quite forgetting what it is that 
we have outlawed. Since then, 
we say of the father hastening to 
kiss a son home from squander- 
ing his estate, That is love, that 
is natural, that is right. So Jesus 
has revealed humanity to itself. 
What used to be regarded as the 
foolish failing of weak men has 
come to be recognized as the 
highest right of the normal hu- 
man heart. This parable has 
taken away the veil that hid us 
from ourselves. 

There is no application in the 
story; nothing is said of God; 
this is a story of home; why has 
it religious significance? Because 

[23] 



mmiM 



The Loving Father 
of the inevitable perception that 
no attitude that is right on earth 
can be wrong in heaven. When 
Jesus revealed in this story the 
supremacy of a father's love in 
dealing with sinners, he took 
away not only the veil between 
us and our hearts but also the 
veil between us and God. This 
simple story has convinced man- 
kind that a man who totters 
under the fearful consciousness 
of a squandered life must be met 
not by a judge but by a father. 
It has taught us to which im- 
pulse to commit the hegemony 
of the soul ; it has shown us that 
love sits deepest and must sit 
sovereign in the human heart ; 
therefore it has shown us that 
God is love. That which is the 
highest attitude toward sin must 
be the attitude of God. 

I hope it is not sacrilegious to 
ask the question : How did Jesus 
know? What led him to the 

[24] 






The Loving Father 
painting of this picture that by 
the universal appeal of its exqui- 
site art has settled what the wise 
men had so long been disputing ? 
He may have imagined the 
story or he may have seen it. 
But in either case the story is a 
creation of Jesus' soul. Let us 
suppose that he saw it. It is one 
thing to run out and kiss your 
boy, returning with the wretched 
impress of dissipation upon him ; 
it is quite another to see the 
Spirit of God pass as the lips 
meet. What was it that made 
Jesus recognize, in the incident 
he may well have seen, the ulti- 
mate truth about the soul of man ? 
Why did he not pass it by simply 
as a casual occurrence? Why 
did he not condemn it as senile 
partiality and the evidence of a 
weak sense of morality? Why 
not? Because Jesus himself ate 
and drank with publicans and 
sinners. He knew how he felt 

[25] 



*&!%$' Gffbgi t£%3 Z2s%i •*!*: 



w 



The Loving Father 
when Zacchaeus, after seeing him, 
changed the whole course of his 
life. He knew how he felt when 
the harlot poured out her costly 
ointment on his feet instead of on 
her face and limbs. He knew 
how he felt as Mary Magdalene 
stretched out her hand toward 
purity. His feeling in these great 
moments was that of the father 
in the parable and not of the 
brother. And he trusted it. 

Or it may be that Jesus never 
saw the scene he here depicts. 
In that more likely case it is his 
joy over Magdalene, over Zac- 
chaeus, over many an unknown 
sinner disgusted with sin, that 
gave the colors in which he 
dipped his brush as he painted 
the figure of the father. In this 
supposition also it was a painting 
from life, but from his own. 
And he was painting from life 
also as he put on the canvas the 
other figure, dark and sharply 

[ 2 6] 




The Loving Father 
chiselled, in the background. He 
painted the elder brother there 
to show that he trusted his own 
soul not merely with the trust of 
intuition but with the confidence 
of reflection. He trusted his soul 
against the leaders of the nation ; 
he trusted his soul against the 
traditions of the elders ; he trusted 
his soul in the face of the holy 
law of God. A sinner was not 
to be stoned to death; he was to 
be kissed into life. There was 
nothing in all the world about 
or in the world of the prophets' 
hearts that he could find that was 
so pure and so exhilarating and so 
authoritative as the joy in his 
heart over a repenting sinner. 
He knew that the angels of God 
rejoiced with him. He knew 
that God felt as he felt. 

And so you see how inevitably 
this simple tale leads us to the 
deepest problem of Christian 
thought: the consciousness of 

[27] 






The Loving Father 
Jesus. The story is no mere 
detached illustration, it is the 
projection of the Spirit of 
Jesus into speech. The holiest 
of earth's old religions has re- 
treated before it into the back- 
ground where the elder brother 
hides his sharp and unlovely fea- 
tures from the joy of the feast. 
With conscious authority Jesus 
revealed to men the secret of 
their souls because he had found it 
written so clearly in His own 
and also because He believed that 
what He found written there He 
would also find written in the 
heart of God. Jesus trusted his 
own heart rather than the tables 
of the law, though they were 
written with the finger of God. 
It was not that they were not 
written by God but that God 
could write more and could write 
more clearly upon his heart than 
upon any other surface in the 
world. 

[28] 





The Loving Father 
And yet because it was a 
human heart that Jesus revealed 
to be the heart of God, we have 
had continual confirmations in 
our own experience of the truth 
of his gospel. At the least move- 
ment of our souls from sin to 
righteousness, we have been aware 
of a deep and controlling joy. 
Either eye to eye or in vision 
we have seen those whom we 
have loved best with a welcoming 
smile upon their lips. The birds 
have seemed to sing for us and 
the heart has been glad with a 
gladness to which it had no right. 
Coming straight from its sins, it 
has been unable to think of Jesus 
Christ in any other attitude than 
that of gracious welcome. This 
joy, overpowering and sin-erasing, 
that springs up immediately in 
the sinful heart that has stepped 
toward God, matches and com- 
plements the joy in the heart of 
Jesus as he was moved with com- 

r*9] 



I 




The Loving Father 
passion and stepped toward the 
sinner to draw him to His side. 
And that joy out of the depths 
of sin has an authority about it 
that the strictest moralist seeks in 
vain to overthrow. That joy, ex- 
perienced at the crises of life, fresh 
from the despair of sin, experi- 
enced anew whenever we have 
the strength given us to move 
out of selfishness toward Christ 
in a simple deed of service, is 
the most life-giving and therefore 
the most real thing that we have 
ever known. It can be nothing 
else than the Spirit of God. 

And so this simple story has 
led us not only to the profound- 
est problem of Christian thought 
but to the depth of Christian ex- 
perience. Our sense of security, 

— in older phrase, our salvation, 

— which is the deposit of our 
joy, lies not in works of right- 
eousness which we have done 

[30] 



The Loving Father 
but in the compassion of our 
beloved, in the welcome from 
our saints, in that which Jesus 
has revealed to us to be the love 
of God. 



Nothing in our hands we bring 
Simply to the Cross we cling, 




and the grace which the Cross 
symbolizes and reveals. 

Our .life is made not from 
within but from without and 
from above. It is ours not to 
boast but to give thanks. We 
have not been rewarded but res- 
cued. We are not our own ; 
we belong to our rescuers. All 
things are ours but we are 
Christ's and Christ is God's. 

And so our soul, belonging to 
the rescuers must itself do rescue 
work. The only salvation it 
needs to think of is the salvation 
of others. God having saved our 
soul we may well afford to take 
our eyes from it. This is not 

[31] 






The Loving Father 
reckless. Remember the words 
of our Lord Jesus how he said: 
"He that would save his soul 
shall lose it but he that loseth 
his soul for my sake the same 
shall save it." Christianity is not 
self-culture; it consists in love 
for others, for God and for men. 
That man lives most who loves 
most; likeness to Christ is best 
estimated in kindness to men; 
the greatest saint is the man who 
loves the most men and women 
and children. We need prayer 
and knowledge and sacrifice and 
self-control and contrition ; but 
above all we need love. 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



III 

022 011 676 1 



